Shopping Carts

Bobby Warner

QMCS 425

April 18^th, 2005

Shopping Carts are continually developing as technology gets better. The need and use of them has spread to nearly every web site that is built. I am going to briefly discuss the basics of shopping carts, software and databases used for them, and three possible solutions of getting a shopping cart on your site.

The purpose of a shopping cart is to display a catalog for customers to view and to be able to order products from the catalog just by using the internet. The idea is to mimic actually going to the store and looking at items, but not having to leave your computer screen. The shopping cart needs to be able to process the interactions with the customers. Some examples of well-known shopping carts are Amazon.com and BestBuy.com.

There are many different types of software available to build a shopping cart. A cart can be build with the simplicity of JavaScript on the client side or using a much more complex CGI program with Perl. There are also many server scripting languages that can be used like ASP, PHP, CFML, and JSP. Although any of these can be used, the CGI programs are the most prominent in the industry. They are harder to build, but they also provide much more flexibility and user interaction.

In reality, any relational database will work to power and e-commerce site. It all depends on what is available on the server. MS Access and MySQL are two of the most widely used today. Larger organizations will also integrate their shopping cart into other business applications on MS SQL and Oracle servers too. Whichever database is used, a shopping cart is composed of three sections. First, there has to be a customers section to store information about customers like shipping address and credit card information. Then you need the catalog which is accomplished through product section. Last, there has to be a way to associate the previous two through the orders section. The specific number of tables for each section depends on your e-commerce needs.

There are three ways to acquire a shopping cart: build your own, open-source, and off the shelf solutions. Building your own is definitely the most complex and time-consuming, but it also has some great benefits like being very customizable and unique. It will also fully meet your business needs because you are the one building it. Shown below is a diagram of the solution being custom build for the KomarKorp e-commerce site eCellar. It is a J2EE solution with an Oracle database.

Open-source solutions are great for getting started. They are simple to implement and trusted in the industry. Some drawbacks though are that it will look like everyone else’s because you are using the same software. It will also be kind of hard to customize it to meet your needs. An example of an open-source solution is: www.oscommerce.org. Off the shelf solutions are very customizable, easy to use and professional. The drawbacks though are that they are very costly and hard to customize. An example of an off the shelf solution is: www.elasticpath.com.

In conclusion, I discussed the need, purpose, and functionality of shopping carts. I also gave some insight into the software and databases being used in the industry today and discussed the three options available for implementing a cart. It is my opinion that open-source solutions are the best though because building your own requires a great deal of knowledge and an off the shelf solution is expensive. As true with any business decision though, look at the business need and future growth of a company before deciding on a possible solution.